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Andrey Volkonskiy
Андрей Волконский
Life Time
14 February 1933 - 18 September 2008
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Andrei Mikhailovich Volkonsky is a descendant of a noble princely family, one of the oldest in Russian history, composer and harpsichordist. He was born on February 14, 1933 in exile – in Geneva, where at that time lived his father, actor and opera singer, Prince Mikhail Petrovich, who fled in 1920 together with the retreating units of the White Guard from the Crimea. Musical abilities appeared in young Andrew early, at the age of five. He composed the first plays that Rachmaninoff heard and studied
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Andrei Mikhailovich Volkonsky is a descendant of a noble princely family, one of the oldest in Russian history, composer and harpsichordist.
He was born on February 14, 1933 in exile – in Geneva, where at that time lived his father, actor and opera singer, Prince Mikhail Petrovich, who fled in 1920 together with the retreating units of the White Guard from the Crimea.
Musical abilities appeared in young Andrew early, at the age of five. He composed the first plays that Rachmaninoff heard and studied first at home, then at the Geneva and Paris Conservatoire. In 1947, together with his parents, he returned to his historical homeland, to the USSR.
The Soviet authorities met the arrivals not affectionately - Stalin ordered to send the prince's family to a settlement in the village near Tambov. Volkonsky, meanwhile, managed to settle in Tambov itself, where Andrei continued his studies, in 1950 he was able to go to study in Moscow, in the conservatory. He could not finish his studies here – the young composer, who hardly accepted Soviet ideology, was expelled from the university in his third year, as part of the struggle against manifestations of “bourgeois ideology.”
Memories of this “ideological purge” haunted Volkonsky all his life, deeply influencing him. In the 1950s and 1960s, he performed as a harpsichordist and organist, and as a propagandist of Renaissance and Baroque music, performing works that had never been heard before in the USSR. In 1965 he founded an ensemble of ancient music called “Madrigal”, which was a great success with the public. As a composer, he tried to compose music different from the accepted doctrine of socialist realism, trying to update and enrich the musical language of Russian music. The composer was banned from the authorities, and in the end his work was completely banned. In 1972 he decided to leave the USSR. From the beginning of 1973 until the end of his days, Volkonsky lived in the West, mainly in France, in Aix-en-Provence, where he died on September 16, 2008.